Nico Lumma, Director of Social Media at Scholz & Friends in Hamburg, Germany, has been blogging for years and has not really been offline since 1995. Lumma chatted with Oliver Gassner about co-browsing, CloudFlare and Kindle Fire.

Nico Lumma: Hi Oliver, My name is Nico Lumma, I’m 39 years old, I haven’t been offline since 1995, and I’m the Director of Social Media of the Scholz & Friends agency group. I’ve been blogging about everything that interests me at http://lumma.de since 2003.

OG: In the past twelve months, what was your biggest personal discovery on the web or in mobile communications?

NL: Hmm. Evernote and Spotify, but they’ve both been around a while already. So Google+.

OG: Do you have good ideas, or are you an innovator? And – what’s the difference?

NL: I’m not sure how to answer your question. I have good ideas – sometimes fantastic ones –, I innovate, and above all, I’m an initiator.
But I see that as a collaborative process, not as something individuals do in private. And depending on who’s involved in the brainwork, I take on different roles. Numerous factors need to come together for a good idea to become a good business idea. Overall, I would say that the team constellation is important, and that focusing on the essence of the idea is crucial – especially in the initial phase.
Of course, how quickly you can reach critical mass also matters, because the best business idea is useless if the market isn’t ripe for it.

OG: Why do most internationally successful web and mobile applications currently come from the U.S. – and only rarely from Europe?

NL: I think the question is more one of where the focus of a startup lies. Many German startups only target the German market, whereas Dutch or Scandinavian ones have an international focus from the outset because of their small domestic markets. Startups in the U.S. have the advantage of a larger network of founders and greater ease in reaching critical mass.
The fact that innovations are met with less skepticism in the U.S. than in Germany is certainly also relevant.

OG: In your opinion, who are currently the most creative people on the web and in the mobile sector? And why?

NL: I have a bad memory for names, so I’d rather mention companies – and thus teams – that I consider to be highly creative.

I really like Flipboard, because they have a completely new way of presenting information. I also think companies like CloudFlare are exciting because of their reinterpretation of the old CDN theme. But the biggest surprise for me was the Amazon Kindle Fire and the cloud-based Silk browser.

OG: Does today’s agency landscape offer that space? Or does everything have to be lean?

NL: You have to work for that space time and again. At the moment, I get up a little earlier than usual to have time for myself and sort my thoughts before the kids wake up and I drive to the agency.

OG: Is a home office environment better for creativity, or do you need to be surrounded by people?

NL: A home office is nice from time to time, but I prefer being together with other people and thinking out loud – that’s the most inspiring.

OG: OK, psst, we promise we won’t tell – what’s the Next Big Thing on the web?

NL: Co-browsing – looking at the same things on the web with others in different locations.

OG: There was once a tool that took everything you surfed past and posted it to a kind of Twitter. Something like that? Or more like screen sharing, or the functions in the G+ Hangouts?

NL: More like Google+ Hangouts with screen sharing, for the web and mobile. It could be really great for shopping together, having fun, and for educational purposes.

OG: And finally, two fundamental questions: iOS or Android? Facebook or Google+? And why?

NL: Definitely iOS for me, because I think it’s more intuitive, and above all more beautiful. Otherwise, Facebook and Google+, but with different usage scenarios. Facebook is becoming increasingly private for me, while I use Google+ to curate information.